Primary Menu

LinuxPlanet: Heart of the Penguin

Thanks to Karsten Hilbert for this link. LinuxPlanet has an article on the use of a Beowulf cluster for defibrillator research: In a small server room on the campus of UAB sits a kitchen supply rack, with four big shelves, each of which holds four dual-processor Dell computers. These sixteen boxes are hooked together in a standard Beowulf cluster, so that all 32 CPUs are working on the same computations in concert, providing a level of computation, their administrator believes, that rivals the performance he could get out of a supercomputer and at a fraction of the cost.

Dr. Andy Pollard is a Biomedical Engineer who is very familiar with using supercomputers and mainframes. Throughout much of the last 15 years, he has used them to perform the billions of calculations needed to simulate the effects of electrical fields on human heart tissue in a deep effort to understand exactly what are the triggers for a fibrillation event…